388 TRANSACTIONS, NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY OF GLASGOW. 
forty years since the last nest was seen, and the number of nests 
cannot be given. They were on Larch trees, and the birds are 
supposed to have been driven away by the-lessening of the trees 
and the laying of a railway close by the plantation.1 Out of my 
Lanarkshire localities, then, there are only Crawford and Douglas 
Castle in existence to-day. 
STIRLINGSHIRE. 
In the part of this county which is in “Clyde” the old 
Statistical Account? gives the following record (which, it may 
be mentioned, is the only notice in that work of the nesting of 
the Heron in “ Clyde”), under Killearn :—‘“ Herons have their 
periodical haunts in several places of the parish, as at Balglass and 
Corbeth, where in tall Fir trees they annually bring forth their 
young.” Another Stirlingshire Heronry of which I can tell was 
also in this parish, and I regret to say is now extinct; but, 
thanks to Mr. J. A. Harvie-Brown, the complete story is 
available by means of the correspondence which he generously 
placed at my disposal, and which is summarised below. 
I had often heard of a Heronry—a large one—at Killearn 
House, but on two recent visits (1897 and 1898) could 
see nothing of it. Subsequently I learned that about six years 
ago (1893) the birds deserted the place altogether for breeding, 
the immediate cause being a gale which blew down some of their 
nesting trees. Emeritus Prof. Blackburn, who remembers the place 
fifty years ago, says there were no Herons nesting then, and they 
probably first built about 1859.° The charming sketch in Mrs. 
Blackburn’s Birds from Moidart and Elsewhere of a ‘“ Heron’s 
nest and young was drawn from one which had fallen from a 
high tree at Killearn,”* and the print is dated 1862. There 
were only three or four nests then, but they slowly increased, and 
about 1876 there were eight nests in the Heron Badan, and three 
or four at the foot of the glen, and one year three at the junction 
of the Dhualt and the Blane. This was the maximum, and the 
hard winters of 1879-80 and 1880-1 killed a great many birds, 

1 Mr. G. Young, in /it., 17th January, 1899. 
2 Vol. XII. (1795), p. 109. 
> Mrs. Blackburn, in /it., 8th February, 1899, 
* Edinburgh, 1895, p. 133. 

